1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and apparatus for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (‘MICR’) signal generation for a MICR character.
2. Description of Related Art
Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions regularly process checks, deposit slips, and other types of bank documents in order to execute financial transactions efficiently. To aid automated processing of these financial transactions efficiently, information is typically printed on these documents in magnetic ink that can be read both by the human eye and a computer. This form of printing is typically interpreted by computer using a conventional process referred to as Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (‘MICR’). As part of the recognition process, a MICR magnetic read head is used to read the MICR characters printed on the document. The American National Standards Institute with the American Bankers Association as Secretariat has promulgated print and test specifications related to the MICR process.
Because misinterpretation of information encoded in financial documents using MICR characters may be extremely costly for participants in the financial transaction, MICR system designers often verify the information identified by a MICR system using a redundant optical character recognition (‘OCR’) system. That is, a computing system uses both a conventional MICR system and a conventional OCR system to identify the characters encoded on the document. The computing system then compares the results from the conventional MICR system and the conventional OCR system to determine whether the results match. The drawback to verifying the results of a conventional MICR system using a conventional OCR system is that conventional OCR systems typically utilize large amounts of computer resources compared to the computing resources consumed by conventional MICR systems. As such, using conventional OCR systems to perform verification introduces tremendous overhead in a computing system used to process financial transactions. Readers will, therefore, appreciate any improvements to conventional systems.